‘Deep search’ of web history?

[jon-nyc]

Seems like there should be a plug-in that searches your actual browsing history, but the content of the pages not just the text of the URLs.

For example, lets say I know I was reading something about Neptune or Sibelius or dendritic cells or whatever, but I forget where. There should be a utility where I type ‘Sibelius’ into a search field and it searches the last (say) 25 pages I browsed looking for the word or phrase. It could display a list of links with highlights under them like google search results. If it doesn’t find anything, it should check more history or just give me the option at the bottom of the search results saying ‘search next 50 pages?’ or whatever.

Does anyone know if such a thing exists?

[jon-nyc]

I get that this would be slow, but I wouldn’t care. This would only get occasional use. It could even run out of the browser.

[Klaus]

That would not be so hard to implement for static pages. But the problem would be dynamic pages.

I assume one could easily search the browser cache.

I have suggested a similar search feature in the past for websites like twitter or Facebook: let me search in what I saw recently.

[Klaus]

My low tech solution would be to navigate to the cache location of your browser and use 'grep' and friends to search.

[jon-nyc]

Here’s one but it builds a database locally after it’s installed. Seems like that could slow things down a lot?

https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/chrome-deeper-history/

[jon-nyc]

@klaus said in ‘Deep search’ of web history?:

My low tech solution would be to navigate to the cache location of your browser and use 'grep' and friends to search.

I’ll try this at some point.

[Horace]

I wasn't aware browsers cached entire pages. That's a thing? I know it saves cookies and URLs, but the content of pages?

[Klaus]

I forgot that modern browsers tend to store cached pages in some kind of database, with some encoding of the data going on, hence you can't just grep through the files. Rather, one would have to read them via an utility such as this one.